new publications - Christian ThoeniAlexandria::new publicationsTemporal stability and psychological foundations of cooperation preferencesVolk, S., Thoeni, C., & Ruigrok, W. (2012). Temporal stability and psychological foundations of cooperation preferences. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 81(2), 664-676, DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2011.10.006. --- A core element of economic theory is the assumption of stable preferences. We test this assumption in public goods games by repeatedly eliciting cooperation preferences in a fixed subject pool over a period of five months. We find that cooperation preferences are very stable at the aggregate level, and, to a smaller degree, at the individual level, allowing us to predict future behavior fairly ...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/207070
2011-11-11Personality, personal values and cooperation preferences in public goods gamesVolk, S., Thoeni, C., & Ruigrok, W. (2011). Personality, personal values and cooperation preferences in public goods games: A longitudinal study. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(6), 810-815, DOI:10.1016/j.paid.2011.01.001. --- Recent research on behavioral heterogeneity in social dilemma situations has increasingly focused on exploring the predictive value of individual difference variables. This paper contributes to this line of research by examining how cooperation preferences in a series of three public goods games conducted over the course of five months are related to personality traits and personal values. A ...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/115317
2011-05-10Micromotives, Microstructure, and Macrobehavior: The Case of Voluntary CooperationGächter, S., & Thoeni, C. (2011). Micromotives, Microstructure, and Macrobehavior: The Case of Voluntary Cooperation. Journal of Mathematical Sociology, 35(1-3), 26-65, DOI:10.1080/0022250X.2010.532260. --- How micromotives, the microstructural features of interactions, and macrobehavior are related is a fundamental question in all social sciences. In this article we argue that laboratory experiments are a useful tool to study this question, because the experimenter can measure motivations, manipulate microstructures, and sometimes even exploit variation in the macrosocial environment. We illustrate...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/115315
2011-05-10Punishment Despite Reasonable Doubt—A Public Goods Experiment with Sanctions Under UncertaintyGrechenig, K., Nicklisch, A., & Thoeni, C. (2010). Punishment Despite Reasonable Doubt—A Public Goods Experiment with Sanctions Under Uncertainty. Journal of Empirical Legal Studies, 7(4), 847-867, DOI:10.1111/j.1740-1461.2010.01197.x. --- Under a great variety of legally relevant circumstances, people have to decide whether or not to cooperate when they face an incentive to defect. The law sometimes provides people with sanctioning mechanisms to enforce pro-social behavior. Experimental evidence on voluntary public goods provision shows that the option to punish others substantially improves cooperation, even if punishment is ...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/71109
2011-01-05Reciprocity-An Economics of Social RelationsThoeni, C. (2009). Reciprocity-An Economics of Social Relations. Journal of Economics, 97(2), 185-187. --- https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/71108
2011-01-05Social comparison and performanceGächter, S., & Thoeni, C. (2010). Social comparison and performance: Experimental evidence on the fair wage–effort hypothesis. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 76(3), 531-543, DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2010.08.008. --- We investigate the impact of wage comparisons for worker productivity. We present three studies which all use three-person gift-exchange experiments. Consistent with Akerlof and Yellen’s (1990) fair wage–effort hypothesis we find that disadvantageous wage discrimination leads to lower efforts while advantageous wage discrimination does not increase efforts on average. Two studies allow us to ...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/71107
2011-01-05Culture and cooperationGächter, S., Herrmann, B., & Thoeni, C. (2010). Culture and cooperation. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 365(1553), 2651-2661, DOI:10.1098/rstb.2010.0135. --- Does the cultural background influence the success with which genetically unrelated individuals cooperate in social dilemma situations? In this paper, we provide an answer by analysing the data of Herrmann et al. (2008a), who studied cooperation and punishment in 16 subject pools from six different world cultures (as classified by Inglehart & Baker (2000)). We use analysis of variance to ...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/71106
2011-01-05Measuring conditional cooperation: a replication studyHerrmann, B., & Thoeni, C. (2009). Measuring conditional cooperation: a replication study. Experimental Economics, 12(1), 87-92. --- We replicate the strategy-method experiment by Fischbacher et al. (Econ. Lett. 71:397–404, 2001) developed to measure attitudes towards cooperation in a one-shot public goods game. We collected data from 160 students at four different universities across urban and rural Russia. Using the classification proposed by Fischbacher et al. (2001) we find that the distribution of types is very similar ...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/70171
2010-11-15Excess entry in an experimental winner-take-all marketFischbacher, U., & Thoeni, C. (2008). Excess entry in an experimental winner-take-all market. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 67(1), 150-163, DOI:10.1016/j.jebo.2006.05.018. --- “Winner-take-all” markets (i.e., markets in which the relative and not the absolute performance is decisive) have gained in importance. Such markets have a tendency to provoke inefficiently many entries. We investigate such markets in an experiment and show that there are even more inefficient entries than predicted by the Nash equilibrium. Moreover, this effect increases with group size. ...https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/47543
2008-09-22Do Managers Reciprocate? Field Experimental Evidence from a Competitive MarketMarechal, M., & Thoeni, C. (2007). Do Managers Reciprocate? Field Experimental Evidence from a Competitive Market. --- https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/publications/45722
2008-06-09